Brave, noble, forgotten – the other side of Italy’s second world war

At the time of the armistice of September 1943, when the kingdom of Italy formally transferred its allegiance from the Germans to the invading Allies, there were some 40,000 British prisoners-of-war languishing in camps around the country. Camp gates were thrown open by fleeing Italian guards, but on orders from Whitehall thousands of PoWs stayed put until the Germans arrived and packed them off to other camps in Germany. Some 4,000 of them, however, set off to seek freedom either by heading north towards Switzerland or south towards the advancing Anglo–American forces, which had just arrived on the Italian mainland after their conquest of Sicily.

Most of these escapees were ill-clad, hungry and in constant danger of betrayal by fascist sympathisers or capture by the occupying German forces that had swept down from the north to stem the Allied advance. The fact that so many survived was entirely due to the compassion and remarkable courage of thousands of Italian peasants who fed and sheltered them at huge risk to themselves.

The Germans had decreed that any Italian family offering succour to an escaped PoW would have its menfolk shot, its house burned down, and its women and children deported. Yet, to an extraordinary extent, Italian peasants — themselves suffering from great hardship and deprivation — disregarded this threat. Eric Newby, an escapee from the camp at Fontanellato near Parma, paid tribute to their heroism in his book Love and War in the Apennines. The late Mark Bonham Carter, publisher and Liberal politician, who as an officer in the Grenadier Guards had been captured by the Germans in Tunisia and taken to a camp near Assisi, escaped from there in 1943 and walked south for 400 miles, taking six weeks to reach the Allied lines.